Help, my partner wants to join the Special Forces

This blog was written by K.  K is the wife of a Special Forces soldier.

40% of us are on antidepressants. 40% of us drink far too much. 10% of us cheat. 10% of us leave.

OK, so I made those statistics up, but you see what I am aiming at.

I am a wife of seven years with a four year old and a two year old.  I am a Special Forces wife.  We don’t speak out much as we are too busy juggling single parenthood whilst our men are away, which is pretty much all of the time.  In fact after doing a quick online search it appears we don’t speak at all, ever.  But there are some pretty cute (nasty) t-shirts for us to wear supporting our husband’s jobs on sale.  Yay!  But we aren’t allowed to wear them outside as we aren’t allowed to tell anyone what our husbands do, so one for the hoovering perhaps?

I shall start at the first issue. Selection.  You get them at home for a bit whilst they prepare and then they bog off and disappear for six months.  You see them a couple of times in the middle of this but they are a complete wreck and cannot really function.  They walk around like a zombie and your job is to feed them up and stop yourself from screaming at them for leaving you with all the stress of your family, their family and your little one’s daily traumas.  You ask what they have been up to whilst your first child empties a bowl of spaghetti shapes over her head and for some reason their answer is forgotten.  So first word of advice would be, leave procreating until you are both settled in your new life if you can.

Then (if they get in, most do not!) that is all over, you have them home for a couple of weeks and they join whichever force it is and you all begin your New Life.  Your new life consists of moving to a completely alien environment where you a) do not know the geographical area and b) do not know a soul.  Your partner knows lots of people but doesn’t have any close friends yet.  You will be introduced to people in a closed environment ‘do’ fairly soon, but this warrants need of finding a babysitter.  Go and knock on your neighbours doors and introduce yourself first thing, otherwise you will be completely alone and you will struggle.  Neighbours = babysitters.

Training here and there, sometimes for weeks and weeks away happens all year around, they do six month tours (mine did his first tour five weeks after joining, therefore meaning I did not see him for over a year) and they also disappear to Places You Cannot Know About.  This brings an added dimension to the relationship.  You can’t ask and he can’t tell.  Sometimes he ends up not going, or he waits for a while potentially going and then doesn’t ever go, sometimes he goes.  Not confusing at all.  Annoying for social engagements, too.  “Ah, he might not be able to come.” “Why not?” “He might be getting ill” “Err….” “Shut up”.  When he comes back he tells you.  Some men tell their wives because they aren’t very good at keeping secrets.  This usually does more harm than good.  Mostly what happens is that the boys all discuss the merits of none of the wives knowing in case one of them slips up in front of another and someone ends up getting a divorce/all their clothes put in the bin.  Then they resolve to not tell anyone.  This brings me on to The Wall of Silence.

The Wall of Silence means if they misbehave when they are away that none of the well behaving ones tells any of the others in case it gets back to one of The Wives who, via the wife tree-grapevine-thing lets slip to the wife of the misbehaver.  When the Wall of Silence is broken, divorce happens.  However as we know, even special forces men have their weaknesses and sometimes they let these things slip.  Best not to repeat them.

You therefore become a secrecy box.  The things your husband does tell you cannot be repeated on the phone (people can listen in to those) they can’t be texted, emailed or even spoken aloud in public.  This resorts to lots of driving to your best-friend-who-is-also-a-wife’s house so you can Talk About Stuff.  Talking about stuff with someone who understands your situation is the only way to stop you going completely insane.  However, staying entirely within this social group results in you feeling like you live in a weird Special Forces bubble.  Not healthy.  Second piece of advice, when your babies are old enough, get a job.  No babies?  Get a job.

Back to the men sides of things.  You went from being a Marine/RAF/Army wife.  You had a place in an (albeit weird) society you had (in my case only just) figured out.  You knew your husband’s rank and what he did for a living and you could openly discuss his whereabouts and what he was up to.  There was a political system of hierarchy and you understood it.   You kissed goodbye to all that when he did selection and when he got in you had to comprehend a completely new way of doing things.  It is much more relaxed in your new world with regards to politics and all that hierarchy rubbish, but it does still subtly exist and your behaviour does still reflect on your husband.  Hence the need to socialise mainly outside of the bubble.  He goes back to being the new boy who knows nothing and you are the new girl who similarly knows nothing and no one, except you aren’t in school making all the new friends.  You are standing outside the gate watching him run around having fun.  I’ll qualify that – you never get to see him doing his work, which I personally think is a great pity.  All of the drawbacks none of the fun!

It took me three years to fully understand what was going on and even now five years on I can’t say I like the lifestyle.  The secrecy took me a couple of years to get used to but now it is second nature, in fact I think I just forget things rather than bother to take them in and mentally lock them away.  An ambivalent forgetfulness seems to suffice.  I still don’t really know how my children are going to turn out as I neither want an intense military influence on their lives but nor do I want to hide things from them.  We are reminded in pre-deployment briefings the effect of the stress of separation caused by tours can have on our children.  What then of the separation their fathers’ jobs inflict on their entire childhoods and teenage years?   I worry the way I bring my girls up will not be enough, I worry that the choices I make are the wrong ones.  I worry that there is no how-to guide and no manual for how to bring up my children.  No matter what anyone else says and how often I tell other women ‘it’s just like normal marines/army’ it isn’t.  It really, really isn’t.  You are on your own now kid, he won’t be there most of the time and your family are probably pretty far away too.

What’s worse is you can’t speak to him most of the time he is away either and these periods can last for several weeks.  This brings me back to where I started; antidepressants, drinking (don’t mix those two although a few of my friends do) and cheating.  All rife, the latter two occurring equally on both sides of the relationship, though of course not in all.  Those wives who manage to avoid temptation caused by extreme loneliness and Lack of Sex but also avoid drinking too much and who haven’t had some form of panic attack or mental breakdown at all are, well, lying.

I’m very proud of him, of course, but it is an odd existence and one every couple arrives at from a different background, treats with a different attitude and copes with in their own way.  So, you think your partner wants to join the Special Forces?  Good luck.  I hope I have not scared you.  It’s great…. honest…..

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